Staging Your Home for the Big Sale
When selling a home, agents and advice articles alike will tell homeowners that they should be spending time staging their home before allowing anyone to come for a showing, but what exactly does it mean to stage a home? Staging is a form of decorating with the goal of making a home appealing to the widest number of people possible in order to help it sell faster. With that in mind, it can be difficult for many homeowners to know where to start staging there home, so here are three tips anyone can use.
When it's time to sell your home, staging may be recommended by your real estate agent. With the right tips and help, your home will fetch a higher price, more bids and will sell faster. Here are a few of the top tips for staging your home when selling it.
Remove Clutter From the Home
Staging doesn't have to be just home décor and landscaping. Just making sure a home is neat and tidy can help to stage a home for visitors, so homeowners should take their time when cleaning to really make sure everything looks good. Here are some different things homeowners can do to make sure their home is clean for buyers:
- Make sure there's no dishes in the sink
- Put clothes hampers in a closet
- Pick up children's or pets' toys
- Make all the beds
- Clean toiletries off of kitchen counters
Decluttering a home can also be a good way to keep buyers from accidentally getting distracted when viewing a home, so it's highly recommended for all homeowners to spend some time cutting out excess and cleaning up before hosting any showings.
Clutter covers up the potential space of a home and includes more than magazines, newspapers and other things on your desks and tables. You can easily clutter up a room with too much furniture. It's best to put anything extra into storage before selling your home to ensure potential buyers can see all of the space of your home.
Keep Furniture In the Home
When selling, it can be easy to assume that a home without furniture can provide a better environment for buyers to focus on the home. However, this is incorrect because a home without furniture ends up being so empty that it forces buyers to scrutinize everything that they do see. On top of this, empty rooms tend to look smaller, colder, and less welcoming than homes that are fully furnished. And when a home doesn't have any furniture in it, it can be difficult for buyers to imagine themselves living in the home and imagining how the furniture they already own will fit into the home. For all these reasons, it's best for sellers to leave their furniture in the home while trying to sell it, or hire a stager who can bring new furniture into the home temporarily.
Remove Personalized Items From the Home
It's common for homeowners to have things like children's drawings on the fridge, framed certificates hanging on walls, or photos of family and other loved ones on display in a home. While these sorts of things may not be out of the ordinary or even be expected to have in a home, when trying to sell, it can be harmful to a home's chances of selling to keep these sorts of things on display.
When staging a home, the ultimate goal to keep in mind is to make it easy for buyers to imagine themselves living in the home, and if someone else's family photos are displayed in every room, it can be difficult for buyers to do that. Before a homeowner opens their home up to visitors, they should be sure to go into every room and look for anything personalized and remove it. Personalized items can include things like:
- Diplomas and certificates
- Photos of family and friends
- Artwork made by someone who lives in the home
- Anything displaying a name
- Talking piece furniture items
- Novelties and collections
Temporarily removing these sorts of items can help buyers feel more at home in the home, which can make them more tempted to buy.
A Clean Smelling House is an Attractive House
Cleaning matters and before any open house or showing, you need to clean your house as best as possible. If your budget allows, you may want to hire somebody to clean your entire house from top to bottom. Nobody wants to think they are moving into a dirty house.
Curb Appeal is Important
Would you visit a home or sale if you drove past it and the lawn was full of garbage? Curb appeal is one of the most important parts of staging your home. This doesn't mean you have to hire a landscaping company, rip up your lawn and redo everything. However, keeping your grass mowed, weeds pulled and bushes trimmed. Of course, you can go a step further with a little bit of landscaping.
A power wash on brick or siding can go a very long way. Make sure you clean your blinds and other window treatments, as well. This can make your home look far better and help you impress buyers even more.
Following these three staging tips can help any Belgravia home owner get their home into shape before selling. For more staging advice, consult a professional stager who can personalize their advice to a specific home.
Your real estate agent can help you with even more staging tips. It may not be fully comfortable to live in your home, while its stages, but this is temporary and a part of the selling process. Make sure you listen to the advice of your real estate agent and the sales process will be much easier.